Free The Assailant by James Patrick Hunt

passenger seat. He regarded the woman. He looked out at the parking lot, put it in context. Hewas hesitating . . . aware of the danger of being caught, but getting a kick out of it too. If he left now, without a memento, without a trinket, he knew that he would feel cheated. He was entitled to a prize. He took another look at the woman. Then he reached over and pulled one of her earrings off. It took a piece of her ear with it. He would wash the flesh and blood off when he got home.
    Raymond closed the door and walked back to his Ford. He left the extension cord in the Camaro.
    Two miles away from the Thunderbird Motel, he began to feel a certain pride. The unexpected had happened. She had come back to the car within a couple of minutes of leaving it. But he had still been ready. He had reacted not with panic but with cool professionalism. Any butcher could handle the predictable. Make an incision, remove the appendix, close, and suture. Who couldn’t do that? Take a mediocrity from a med school in the West Indies, he could do it. But something more was required of the professional. A cool head. A
finesse
.
    Raymond drove the Ford on Manchester to Interstate 270. He took that south to Interstate 44, past the Chrysler plant, and then south on a winding road into the hills. No one knew about the Ford except him. He had bought it with cash from some clodhopper in Arnold, and he had not told the seller his real name. The car was “unlisted,” so to speak. A phantom’s car.
    Raymond Sheffield owned a small barn on a defunct horse farm. He had purchased the property with cash. He parked the Ford in the barn next to his Mercedes E350. The Mercedes wasblack. It was his “doctor’s” car. Raymond backed it out of the barn, left it running while he got out and locked the barn doors. Then he got back into the Mercedes and drove back to his house in Sunset Hills.
    It was almost two in the morning when he turned on his living-room light. He didn’t feel tired. He went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While the kettle boiled, he cut pieces of sharp cheddar cheese on a wooden cutting board. Then he transferred the cheese slices to a dish and placed wheat crackers next to them.
    He felt better after having a snack and tea. When it was done, he set the dish into the sink. Then he removed Adele Sayers’s earring from his coat pocket, washed it in the bathroom sink, and dried it with a towel.
    He sat in his reclining chair in the living room and examined the earring. A cheap piece of costume jewelry. She had not been high-class at all. Raymond felt a disappointment. Maybe it was because the earring was no longer attached to the girl.
He
would know what it was. Whenever he looked at it, he would know. But now that it was clean, it seemed inanimate. Not the prize he had thought it was. You hit a squirrel with your car, you don’t mount its head above your fireplace. It’s just a squirrel, for heaven’s sake.
    He sighed and set the earring on an end table. Maybe he would feel better about it tomorrow. Maybe he would see it and know what it should’ve meant; maybe the memento would come to have meaning in time.
    Raymond sipped his tea and thought back to the party.
    Helen Krans had not been there.
    She had asked him at the end of their shift if he was going, and he had said that he probably was. She said that she had plans and couldn’t go. Her disappointment appeared genuine. Raymond did not ask her what her plans were. But he knew she was going out with Harry Tassett. Raymond showed no hostility or displeasure at this. Indeed, he hadn’t really felt any at that time. He believed that her relationship with Tassett—if you could call it that—would be short-lived. Tassett was an oaf. And though that probably wouldn’t matter to someone like Helen Krans, she would come to see that Tassett was going to continue to chase other women and that she was just part of that